Old Well Update

The well guys came today to fix our cave problem.  They enlarged the hole big enough for one of the men to get down in there to look around.

This guy got the upper half of his body into the hole and took some picture for me.

This is the view from the hole up to the concrete cap.  That's a pipe there in the middle that comes up from the middle of the well to ground level where the cap is.  That cap and the brick structure were pretty much resting on nothing but shifting sand.

The guys decided that it would be easier to fill the well without that concrete cap, so they broke through it and let it fall down into the water.  This is what we could see while looking down from the top.  The shiny bit at the bottom is the water.  They determined that the well was about 45 feet deep.  That's a long way to fall.  But if one did fall down there, at least one could shimmy up that pipe in the middle to get out.

The solution was to fill the well to the waterline with Bentonite clay.  It's a clay that's taken out of Wyoming and pelletized by Halliburton.  When the clay is put in water, it expands five times it's size and turns into a jelly-like clay that water can't pass through.

This is the Bentonite clay being poured into the well.  It looks like a gray gravel.

You can see the clay at the bottom, already it has absorbed the water and expanded.  Tomorrow, we'll have a couple of loads of regular Texas clay from down the road delivered and we'll use it to fill the well to ground level.  Then we'll be back to where I started - able to put my pond liner tub and topsoil in there with plants, a water lily and some goldfish.

Yay!